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Usually when I go to see a film I have a good idea about what it’s going to be like from advanced publicity, reviews etc. All I knew about Animal Kingdom was that it was about a family of bank robbers in modern-day Melbourne (the exact period is a little vague), has an ensemble cast in which the only actor well-known outside Australia was Guy Pearce, had appeared to some acclaim at Sundance and received 8/10 in the Guardian’s summary of reviews. I expected a superior heist-action film and the opening credits, with a montage of unfocused security-camera stills of bank robberies in progress, reinforced this expectation. There was certainly some pretty violent action but, unlike, say, Goodfellas or Heat, it was in short sharp bursts. It turned out to be less a crime-action film, more a gripping psychological thriller. Despite the positive reviews, the early-evening screening I attended was almost empty which is a pity.

Outline – not too many spoilers

Joshua’s mother dies of a heroin overdose and the hapless 17-year-old contacts his grandmother to arrange the funeral. For years his mother had kept him away from her violent criminal brothers but the grandmother welcomes him into the home. The Cody brothers are considering getting out of the bank-robbing business as the police are all over them. The brothers are Darren, the youngest, who is making money in the drug trade in partnership with a crooked cop; Craig, the middle son, who is none too bright but highly excitable, no doubt because he frequently samples the merchandise from his trade; and the oldest, Andrew, who is nicknamed Pope, a psychopathic criminal who is being sought by the police. The brains behind the gang belong to Barry, a family associate who advises Pope to get out of bank-robbing. His preferred option is the stock market but even the grubbier drugs business seems a better bet than carrying on in the old way. Pope doesn’t own nor would he have a clue how to operate a computer to become a stock-broker and considers the drug business as being for sissies. (This exchange reminded me of the one between Stringer Bell in The Wire who wants to move more into ‘legitimate’ business while gang boss Avon Barksdale just wants to be a gangster). Heading the family is the clawingly sentimental but quite vicious mother, Janine Cody. Janine at first seems to be the family skivvy but when her sons are in danger she comes more and more to the fore and becomes a key player in the developing narrative.

The police execute Barry in cold blood and Pope decrees revenge. After more or less forcing Joshua (known as “J”) to go out and steal a car for the job, Pope and his brothers go out and kill two policemen at random. Local detective Leckie (Guy Pearce) enters the story at this point and realises that the way to pin the killing on the Codys is through J. The rest of the film is taken up with the psychological pressure that Pope, aided by a crooked lawyer, exerts on his siblings and nephew, paralleled with Leckie’s hope of bringing J over to his side.

Commentary

The opening of the film sets the tone. We see J sitting on the sofa watching a game show on television with his mother asleep by his side. She is not in fact sleeping but dead and he has already called the paramedics. The fact that he continues to watch TV could suggest callousness but I think that would be a misreading. He is, in a sense, the protagonist of the film but, at first, a fairly passive one. Director David Michôd gives him a voiceover in the early part of the film, seemingly for expositional reasons. Despite script-writing guru Robert Kee’s dictum that voiceovers are a contentious device for exposition, I find them quite useful when done effectively, for example in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Terence Malick’s Badlands. In fact I thought we might be in for the kind of naïve voiceover we find in that film from Sissy Spacek’s character. J’s is much more dispassionate, cool and calm despite the strange family environment he finds when he moves to his grandmother’s. The voiceover finishes (from memory) after about twenty minutes but it does frame the basic lesson – all criminals come apart – which is fleshed out over the next hour and a half.

Perhaps the best things about the film were the performances. Guy Pearce had a supporting role which he plays with quiet effectiveness but there were, arguably, three standout performances. The first was James Frecheville as J. It was a misleading performance, at first quiet and introverted, not quite allowing us to see where he stands with his family’s activities, first suggesting that nothing much was going on inside his head but later suggesting a sense of shock at the crazy world he has entered. When these activities start to infiltrate his life beyond the family he becomes a more active agent in the drama.

The performances of both Jackie Weever (Janine) and Ben Mendelsohn (Pope) share, in their different ways, a certain kind of creepiness. The character of Janine (for which Jackie Weaver was nominated in the recent Oscars as the Best Supporting Actress) shares certain features with previous fictional criminal mothers such as Ma Jarrett (Margaret Wycherly) in Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949) (whose son, played by James Cagney, was of course Cody Jarrett – any significance?); Billie Whitelaw as Violet, mother of the ultra-violent twins in The Krays (d. Peter Medak, 1990); and Livia Soprano (Nancy Marchand). The latter prefigures Janine in the way Livia is happy to plot the death of her son as Janine is happy to sacrifice her grandson but unlike the latter she is passionately (almost oedipally – kissing them passionately on the lips) fond of her sons. When they go to jail she displays her ruthlessness and power. Her performance is at its most effective when she is silent, her eyes almost giving her entire performance. A mistress of manipulation, behind her benign smile there is coldness with which she sketches what must happen to J to save her sons, all the while keeping the grandmotherly expression on her face. A chilling performance.

Ben Mendelsohn’s tactile performance as Pope was unsettling from the start. He’s off his medication and is a figure of dangerous unpredictability and ominous impulse. It is not just in the way the character seems at any moment to hit out at whoever displeased him but the way, for example, that he pretends to be a sort of father figure, particularly to the youngest brother Darrell, encouraging him to come out as gay, telling he doesn’t mind but menacingly so as to increase his control over his weak younger brother. One unsettling moment foreshadows Pope’s later horrific treatment of Debbie, J’s 16-year-old-girlfriend. She falls asleep as J is out of the room and carries her into the bedroom, his hands lingering on her legs until J arrives.

One aspect of the film that was at one point causing me problems was the pacing of the narrative. At first, when J arrives at the Codys, I found it difficult to distinguish between the brothers and their associate Barry. Fairly quickly the character of Barry establishes itself, especially as Pope’s entrance is held back. It might have been more effective for Barry to be left a bit longer as a counterweight to Pope so that the death of a potential protector for Josh highlights his vulnerability more dramatically. Later, when the police seemed to be making headway in the case and the killers’ arrest and conviction seemed inevitable, I felt the narrative sagged a little. However, a final act opened up with Janine’s role becoming major and our sympathy for J and anxiety on his behalf (and on behalf of his girlfriend Debbie and her family) being ratcheted up. It slackened off after the trial to be revamped by a triumphant Janine confronting Detective Guy in the supermarket and an explosive ending (which, although I half-guessed was about to happen, nevertheless was a shock.

Finally, much of the atmosphere in the film was conveyed by the music and cinematography. Antony Partos’s austere score was dark, melancholic, tense and menacing. I think I need a further viewing to absorb the mise en scene and cinematography but I was left with an impression of frequent (over-frequent?) slow motion sequences, slow zooms and noirish lighting which combined to create a mood of tragic inevitability.

Angels of Evil is a stylish Italian entry into the crime biopic genre which has seen a recent resurgence with the success of the two Mesrine films starring Vincent Cassell. It’s also related to another recent biopic, the mammoth take on the international revolutionary criminal Carlos. But perhaps it is best considered alongside recent fictional crime sagas such as Animal Kingdom, Un prophète and Gomorra.

The central character in Angels of Evil is Renato Vallanzasca, a Milanese street kid born in 1950 who gravitates towards bank robberies and eventually becomes Italy’s ‘most wanted’ partly because he becomes involved with the deaths of police officers. The film begins with one of his many prison terms and then reveals his story in flashback. What is noticeable is the extent to which Vallanzasca’s no doubt partly romanticised biography so closely resembles a typical crime genre narrative. For instance, his gang includes his blood brother from the streets, Enzo, a man who may have learning difficulties but who is certainly a highly dangerous companion, and his ‘little sister’ Antonella from the same background. Renato’s parents remain supportive throughout (it seems barely credible that in one of his breakouts from prison, Renato goes to his parents’ flat).

Generically, the film is very close to Mesrine and Renato is represented as almost a Robin Hood type figure, a generally honourable character who shows up the inadequacies of the police and prison service and appeals directly to the public. I was reminded at times of the idea of the Italian ‘outlaw’ figure and Eric Hobsbawm’s ideas about ‘social bandits’. I haven’t seen Francesco Rosi’s film about the Sicilian bandit Lucky Luciano but I wonder if there are any parallels. Vallanzasca is not a rural bandit of course. But his street origins in the early 1960s do mean that he is an ‘outsider’ and one of the narrative strands in the film deals with his attempts to oust the more established crime families in Milan. I’ve seen criticisms of the film complaining that given its time span (primarily the 1970s and 1980s) it doesn’t say enough about the changing nature of organised crime in Italy. I confess that I couldn’t keep track of all of the action in the film and the various groups from different crime organisations but I did note that Renato (like all ‘old-time’ criminals in genre films) bemoans the young thugs and their mindless violence, believing that he himself was ‘honorable’. I’ve just finished reading an Italian crime fiction novel about the Calabrian criminal families and I was intrigued to see that they get a mention here alongside the Sicilians.

I thought Angels of Evil was an enjoyable (if very bloody) genre film on a par with Mesrine but lacking the intensity of Un prophète or Gomorra. The central performance by Kim Rossi Stuart is its strongest element alongside the two young women played by Valeria Soleano and the Spanish actress Paz Vega (as Antonella). The multi-lingual German actor Moritz Bleibtreu plays one of the gang members. Rossi Stuart also starred in director Michele Placido’s earlier crime film Romanzo criminale (2005) – a very similar package about a criminal gang in Rome in the 1970s which I haven’t seen. Overall I have to agree with a reviewer who suggested that the film reveals a cast and crew who most enjoyed dressing up for the 1970s/80s scenes.

Angels of Evil is that now rare beast – a widescreen ‘popular’ European genre picture that struggles to get even a limited UK release, even though it was part-produced by Fox International Italy and Canal+. Once, such films, often dubbed, received a wide release in the UK. Ironically, Italian domestic production is on something of a roll at the moment scoring multiple hits at home. Angels of Evil opened at No4 in the Italian Top 20 in January 2011 (when 4 out of the Top 5 were Italian ‘domestic features’). When it dropped out of the Top 20 after four weeks the film had taken $3.76 million. It might do quite well when it opens in France in September.

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The 24th Leeds International Film Festival was a success both in terms of audiences and in the variety and range of films provided. Total admissions were 29,000, improving once again on earlier years. Certainly, most of the screenings I attended enjoyed substantial audiences. There were some screenings with just a few devotees. But the programmes of World Cinema that I favoured generally did very well. The art and foreign language films I saw seem to have larger audiences than similar films capture outside the Festival fortnight.

The change to the city Town Hall as the main venue for the Festival presumably helped in this, as the auditorium accommodates 900 people. Not all the films screened there attracted a full house, but there were still some sizeable audiences. The Town Hall is a definite improvement on the previous central venue, The Carriageworks. There is a large screen erected, about 25 feet high I reckon. And the prints and projections were generally very good. The acoustics are trickier, though still an improvement on The Carriageworks. As a concert hall it is not designed for film and dialogue in particular can be indistinct. As the Festival progressed the delivery improved, and sitting on the ground floor rather than the balcony was a good idea. For films with strong musical or sound mix it worked very well.

The critic’s judgements on the programme selected Tuesday After Christmas (Marti, Dupa Craciun, Romania, 2009, directed by Radu Muntean) for The Golden Owl Award. Note that the Owl graces the logo of the City. This is another film from what is now termed the Romanian New Wave. It offers a portrait of an extra-marital affair. The new award, the Golden Owl Lifetime Achievement Award went to Tsai Ming-Liang. A feature and a short film by him both featured in the Festival, and have been reviewed on this Blog. Another award went to a German horror film, The Last Employee (Der Letzte Angestellte, 2010, directed by Alexander Adolph). This award is part of the European Federation of Fantastic Film Festivals, and as such Leeds hosts its annual Silver Méliès competition for the UK. The film now goes forward to the final European leg of the competition. And the jury made special mention of the Irish thriller Savage (2008, directed by Brendan Muldowney). I would expect these features to get some sort of release for the wider UK audience.

Audiences get to record their own preferences by being able to score films from one to five stars. The method does not really enable strict comparisons because audience size varies considerably, as possibly do completion rates. Anyway, the music documentary High on Hope (UK, 2009, directed by Piers Sanderson) was the overall favourite. This deals with acid parties in the late 1980s. The King’s Speech was named as favourite fiction feature, [and is also reviewed on the blog]. After collecting audience votes from every screening during the Film Festival, High on Hope received an average score of 4.64 out of 5. Both films would seem to be likely to enjoy good audiences on a general release. In fact, The King’s Speech is apparently already doing well in the USA, with a tip for a possible Oscar. I can believe that Colin Firth will get a Best Performance Nomination for his characterisation of King George VI. Unfortunately for the producers they failed to foresee the recent royal announcement, otherwise they could have included a Royal wedding in the plot as well.

One film that other viewers recommended several times to me was Animal Kingdom (Australia, 2010, directed by David Michôd) a thriller set in the Melbourne underworld. This should be released generally into the UK. Another was The Art of Negative Thinking (Kunsten å tenke negativt, Norway, 2006, directed by Bård Brelen), a satirical black comedy. I think both performances for this feature were sold out.

In line with our own Blog’s interests I concentrated on World Cinema, [reviews are included separately]. There were some welcome revivals, especially Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors. Also the extremely rare print of Children of the Beehive. And there were contemporary releases; the best of which I think would be Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

One item of programming found in past festivals but missing this year was a focus on a particular director: the retrospective of Francesco Rosi a few years back was splendid. Nor did we get a particular national focus like the German films from last year. Despite this, the variety of films and the quality of the best features made this a very strong programme. And the attention given to documentary and experimental film is also very commendable. One hopes that the present cultural constrictions will not prevent an equally enjoyable Festival in 2011.

This film is clearly a ‘message movie’. But, for me, the most stimulating moment in the screening was among the preceding adverts. The first was by Act on CO2. It presented a father reading an illustrated moral fable to his young, blonde-haired daughter at bedtime. We saw the animals and natural settings that succumbed to the man-made toxic pestilence. At the end the young girl asked her father, ‘Is there a happy ending?’ It struck me that if she was a few years older she could see the film that I was about to watch. In this post-apocalyptic tale the opening shows a world where there is clearly not a happy ending for the animal kingdom, for nature and for human society.

The following contains some plot information: however, I think the plot’s trajectory is fairly obvious from the opening moments.

The film is an adaptation of a highly praised novel by Cormac McCarthy. I found the book an absorbing and powerful fable, but (like No Country for Old Men) that its minimalist style has definite limitations. The minimalism is drastically reduced in the film medium. We are immediately shown facial expressions and character movement: the actual detail of the devastation: and intriguing detail in the background: all amplify the bare bones of the novel. The filmmakers accentuate this tendency partly through cinematic style, for example the use of the overhead, dramatic wide shots: but mostly by the often obtrusive accompanying music. I cannot remember many musical riffs in my imagination when I read the novel.

The filmic approach also gives added emphasis to other aspects that are found in the novel. This applies especially to the roles of female characters. In The Road Charlize Theron (woman) plays the lead female. The fact that she is a star just makes it more obvious that her character is subordinate and marginal to the men: and she also has a negative function in the narrative. In fact, in both the book and the film, men trudge off into the wilderness (here father and son played by Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee), with the women frequently left behind in the world of domesticity. In this case, though, the domestic world has collapsed. Man and the wilderness is a common motif in popular films: the Hollywood Western is mainly constructed round this situation. McCarthy’s books tend to be westerns as well. But equally in the broader US culture the situation has almost mythic status. (Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel offers an excellent analysis of this tendency).

A more problematic treatment, not in the book, concerns African-Americans. I think there are one or more among the extras, including in a gang involved in cannibalism. However, the one black character (Michael Kenneth Williams) presented centrally in a sequence is the thief. In the book McCarthy describes this character thus, “Scrawny, sullen, bearded, filthy. His old plastic coat held together with tape.” Making him a black character might seem neutral casting, but that is not the case in the sort of capitalist society where racist stereotypes are still powerfully present.

Critics have commented on how the film softens or downplays aspects of the novel – the treatment of cannibalism is a good example. Joe Penhall was asked about changing the written story for the film and suggested that movies were ‘subject to immutable laws’, [Interview on NightWaves, Radio 3, January 7th 2010]. This is over-emphatic, though mainstream films are subject to powerful conventions. These are apparent at the film’s ending. On the seashore setting there is one extra character (uncredited) as loaded in connotations as the wilderness itself. I think you will recognise him/her as soon as you watch the final scene.

King Lear is Shakespeare’s tale of an ageing monarch who makes a spectacular error of judgement by dividing his kingdom through a ‘love trial’ of his three daughters, unleashing chaos in the land. There are countless film versions, some of the best known like King of Texas (US TV film, 2002), A Thousand Acres (Iowa, US 1997), Ran (Japan 1985), transplanting the story to radically different soil. Peter Brook’s monochrome film (1971) is considered by many the definitive screen version of Shakespeare’s original. In his absurdist vision, the key word ‘Nothing’ reverberates throughout – from the black silence of the opening titles to the apocalyptic waste of the ending. Most British stage and screen productions have followed in this tradition of nihilistic despair, recent ones taking the theme of breakdown further by retreating to the small, dark, senseless space of an old man’s dementia-ridden head.

It was refreshing therefore recently to discover Grigori Kozintsev’s gloriously expansive Russian language film Korol Lir. Released the same year as Brook’s film and superficially similar in its monochrome vision of tragic destruction, it deserves to be far better known: Kozintsev offers a more coherent, richer and arguably uplifting reading of Shakespeare. The film is available on DVD but only a cinema re-release could truly do justice to this wide-screen epic. A contemporary of Eisenstein, Kozintsev was an experimental film-maker who learned his craft in the great age of montage, with the creative theatre and film school FEKS; in his later career, he developed into a visually imaginative but more mature artist with a (socialist?) realist style. He was also a Shakespeare scholar with a deep interest in his tragic ‘philosophy’, so it is no surprise that in the 1940s he staged and later filmed his two darkest tragedies Gamlet (1964) and Korol Lir (1971). Kozintsev declared he wanted ‘to create a visual poetry with the same quality as that of Shakespearian verse’ (dialogue with Ronald Hayman, 1973) – so dramatically cut Shakespeare’s lines (the film runs to only 2 hours 11 minutes). Achieving his goal was made easier because of his long and close collaboration with translator Boris Pasternak and composer Dmitri Shostakovich on productions of Shakespeare. Shot on the shores of the Baltic, both films are remarkable for their powerfully symbolic elemental imagery, luminous clarity of vision and epic – often monumental – shot-making. There is no finer example than the breathtaking scene in which the ghost of Hamlet’s father first appears on the castle battlements.

Much of the rich ambiguity of Kozintsev’s Shakespeare films derives from the Soviet context: they share the quality of ‘double-voicing’ (Bakhtin) that characterises much of the art produced in a repressive state. That is to say, they can be read as innocent ‘art’ or allegorically, as political critique of the Soviet system. In turn, audiences were primed to look for encoded meanings – each one potentially a small act of resistance. To the distant pre-Christian English setting of King Lear, Kozintsev added another layer of strangeness, using some foreign actors dubbed into Russian – for example, lead actor Estonian Juri Jarvet. As a truth-hating tyrant whose actions ruin his country (symbolised by his tearing up of an enormous map of the nation), Lear stands for oppressive Soviet leadership, from Stalin to Brezhnev. However, Kozintsev suggests he is doomed from the start: unlike the great bearded patriarch of the silent era Lear (1909) or Patrick Stewart’s heroically masculine ‘King of Texas’, gaunt-faced Juri Jarvet cuts a frail figure. For all the actor’s passionate performance, this Lear is dwarfed by his throne, his outsize royal garments and ridiculously sculpted hair collapsing around him as he hurtles towards his downfall. In presenting the all-powerful leader as almost comically impotent from the start, Kozintsev creates pity for Lear and but also stirs the political hopes of his audience.

Grigori Kozintsev

Like many Russian artists who saw Shakespeare as a radical and their contemporary, Kozintsev understood instinctively the deeply political nature of a tragic vision that links the fate of the individual to the nation. From the opening frames to the great final battle, this feels like a biblical epic. In his re-imagining of the play, Kozintsev presents the poor multitudes on the move, devotedly following Lear on his journey all the way to Dover – crowds that perhaps represent the peasantry or proletariat, the dispossessed and alienated living in internal exile. Lear has to be reduced to their level, to a state of Nature, to ‘ . . . a bare, forked animal’ before the process of regeneration can begin. At this climactic point of the narrative, Kozintsev makes Nature his central character. In a series of intensely atmospheric scenes Ionas Gritsius’ savagely beautiful cinematography captures the disorder both in Lear’s mind and kingdom. In the critical storm scene, there is an epic sweep to his camera work, which takes us to vast windswept wastelands where high overhead shots pick out a tiny figure illuminated in the darkness – Lear raging pitifully against the elements. Such shots are reminiscent of Orson Welles’ Macbeth and Othello, but Welles’ use of chiaroscuro is more noirish. In this scene wild grunting boars, horses, and bears charge restlessly through desert spaces, amid an enhanced soundscape of violently rustling trees and howling winds. The film abounds in such primitive imagery and Kozintsev does not flinch from the darkest side of human nature. After the unimaginable cruelty of Gloucester’s eyes being gouged out, he reflects Lear’s verdict that he has spawned sexually rapacious ‘tigers, not daughters’ by cutting to invented scenes of Goneril and Edmund having sex, followed by the necrophiliac horror of Regan not so much kissing as devouring the face of her dead husband Cornwall.

Despite its darkness, there are other striking features that make this a politically engaged film. Firstly, Kozintsev gives the Fool (Oleg Dahl) a much greater role than usual, exploiting his ambiguous status as state servant but licenced truth-teller to represent him partly as the artist, and partly as the ‘holy fool’ of Russian tradition. He introduces him to the play earlier than does Shakespeare, showing Lear from the start sheltering him under his cloak and patting him on the head, like a surrogate child, a reminder of the loving daughter Cordelia he has unjustly banished. Crouching in dark corners, the Fool is a loyal dog growling out his riddling wisdom to Lear. From the opening titles, Shostakovich uses the motif of jaunty pipe music to signal the Fool’s artistic purity and role as the voice of Shakespeare’s conscience. Even though the playwright has him fade away well before then, Kozintsev keeps him till the final frames, when he is kicked aside like a cur but rises defiantly to play Russian folk tunes that hint of hope to the audience.

Cordelia’s marriage to the King of France with the overt Christian symbolism

Secondly, Kozintsev makes overt use of Christian references in a pagan world that can be taken for the atheist state. Shostakovich begins with highly emotive religious chants, reflecting the growing role of the Russian Orthodox Church as a force of resistance in the later Communist era. His orchestral score then builds to a thundering discordant climax as Lear ascends prophet-like to the top of his castle to address his kneeling subjects, only to spew ugly fire against his daughters. To emphasise that Lear is the false god of the old order, Kozintsev cuts straight to a new order in which the forces of good are aligned with Christian imagery of resurrection: Cordelia’s marriage to France (off-stage in Shakespeare’s play) takes place before a great wooden cross. He underscores this idea through the use of a fabric motif; first seen in the background to the opening and closing titles is a threadbare coarse-weave fabric that symbolises both the ruination of Lear’s land and its salvation. This becomes clear when Gloucester’s innocent banished son Edgar (disguised as Poor Tom the beggar) uses such a fabric to cover his nakedness, but later gives up even this meagre rag to bind his broken staff into a cross marking his father’s grave. Fire that is first foregrounded burning in Lear’s hearth eventually becomes a raging holocaust, evoking perhaps the destruction of two world wars, Hiroshima and Vietnam. But the effect is cathartic and perhaps revolutionary: the whole social order must be razed to the ground for a better one to arise. After the deaths of Lear and Cordelia, the camera takes us out wide to birds flying over the sea, signifying not death but liberation. Ending on images of sacrifice and redemption might in a western context seem almost reactionary, but here can be read as resistance.

Faced with the everyday threat of personal and nuclear annihilation, for the artists of Brezhnev’s Cold War USSR despair might have seemed a western luxury; on the other hand, engagement was an act of survival. Some might dismiss the film as rather traditional, but for me it is precisely Kozintsev’s commitment to a search for meaning that makes his version of King Lear particularly appealing in our jaded postmodern age. His achievement was to marry poetry and politics using the moving image – the ultimate light illusion – to conjure something from Shakespeare’s ‘Nothing’.

The film is officially available from Lenfilm (with English subs) in HD (but a slightly-squeezed aspect ratio on YouTube:

This year’s Chinese New Year screening at HOME Manchester presented by the Chinese Film Forum UK and the Confucius Institute at The University of Manchester, was a Taiwanese film. We’ve had a variety of features over the last few years in Manchester and they have usually been films that haven’t been acquired for UK release. … Continue reading →

Ek Tha Tiger introduced the pairing of Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif as ‘super spies’ in a Hindi cinema blockbuster for Eid 2012 that became a big commercial hit. It’s interesting to re-visit now that the sequel has been similarly successful after release during the Christmas period of 2017. Though both films are instantly recognisable … Continue reading → […]

‘Creative Visions’ is the title of the latest celebration of Hong Kong Cinema at HOME in Manchester (continuing a series of celebrations that started during the cinema’s previous incarnation as Cornerhouse). This latest short season of films presents work from 1997-2017, twenty years since the handover of Hong Kong back to China. HOME’s seasons come … Contin […]

Hotel Salvation is the latest Indian Independent film to successfully tour film festivals worldwide and now receive a limited general release in the UK. It was first launched at the Venice Film Festival last year. Its young (25 year-old) writer-director Shubhashish Bhutiani had already won prizes with Kesh (2013), his thesis film short from New … Continue re […]

Cloud-Capped Star is the first film in Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak’s trilogy about the partition of Bengal in 1947 and its aftermath. It could be argued that all of Ghatak’s features between 1952 and 1977, when his last work was released posthumously, were concerned with the partition, but it is the trilogy that has been … Continue reading →

This is the third feature by the French auteur Katell Quillévéré. It’s adapted from a novel by Maylis De Kerangal and the screenplay is by the director and the highly-experienced Gilles Taurand. I’d seen and enjoyed Ms Quillévéré’s first two features, Love Like Poison (2010) and Suzanne (2013), and I was keen to see the third, although I knew it … Continue r […]

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The Labour leadership election appears to have got the UK press and broadcasting media in a real tizz. One of the most aggravating aspects of the reporting is the constant appendage of ‘left-wing’ to any reference to Jeremy Corbyn. He is … Continue reading →

The 10th anniversary of the ‘7/7 bombings’ in 2005 in London saw a range of remembrance events across the UK. These resulted in a great deal of media coverage. One BBC radio reporter referred to the four young bombers and … Continue reading →

The local elections in England last week produced two examples of quandaries for broadcasters. The big story for the BBC and other commentators was the rise of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), led by a curiously charismatic Nigel Farage. UKIP are … Continue reading →

Hinterland is a good example of the global/local. Like some other modern states the UK has statutory requirements and cultural policies that protect the other languages in the Home Nations and this means support for both Welsh and Gaelic broadcasters … Continue reading →